It seems like just yesterday we were looking back on all we did in 2012, but another year has gone by and it’s time to take a moment and reflect on everything that we accomplished in 2013. Here it is: The CloudAccess.net 2013 Year in Review!
New Team Members
As Jim Collins says, you’ve got to “get the right people on the bus … and the right people in the right seats.” Six new team members got on the CloudAccess.net bus this year including Cloud Support Specialists Janis Miciopulos (Poland), Dhaval Desai (India), and Joseph Roberts and Keith Petkus (United States). Nisheeth Barthwal, a Platform Programmer (India), and Miraj Ranpura, a System Administrator (India), also joined the team in 2013. We’re pleased to have added such talented people to keep this bus moving forward.
Cloud Control Panel 2
One of our biggest achievements in 2013 is the Cloud Control Panel (CCP) 2, which was officially integrated platform-wide in October. The CCP separates CloudAccess.net from other hosting providers because it’s a customitzed, feature-rich, intutitive and powerful interface between our clients, our company and each Joomla Instance hosted on our platform. The CCP was completely refactored with backend code optimizations and built on a custom MVC framework. The greatly improved UI is based on the Bootstrap Framework, which is responsive and HTML5 ready. CCP 2 features include:
Joomla Instance Management
- Online Support Tickets
- Managed Backups
- Joomla Instance Replication
- MySQL Access & Management
- JPA Import Support
- CloudMail Integration
- Server Information
- Security Features
- Error & Access Logs
- Domain Name & DNS Management
- and much, much more!
Server & Platform Improvements
2013 saw the introduction of Joomla 3.1 and 3.2, and we’re always keeping our clients up-to-date with the most recent and secure Joomla version possible. We also made several platform-wide upgrades by adding a new storage area network (SAN). We added 6 generation 2 servers with SSD drives and 64GB RAM to our shared hosting platform and upgraded all of our existing servers to 64GB RAM. We unified server software on all shared hosting nodes which increases uptime, scalability and availability for all CloudAccess.net clients.
Joomla Events
Several different CloudAccess.net team members also traveled a lot in 2013 to attend Joomla events around the globe. These events include:
- JoomlaDay™ India
- J and Beyond in Noordwijkerhout, Netherlands
- JoomlaDay™ Spain
- JoomlaDay™ Poland
- Joomla World Conference at Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts
- JoomlaDay™ Bangkok
Joomla Teams
We also had many of our team members actively contribute time and energy to the Joomla Project in 2013 by participating in a variety Joomla Teams including:
- Social Media Team
- User Group Team
- Events Team
- Extensions Directory Team
- Capital Commitee Team
- Marketing Team
Many of our team members are also active in Joomla User Groups and make community contributions by writing JCM articles, creating video tutorials, blogs, logos and infographics.
2013 Milestones
- Over 17,000 active Joomla sites hosted on our platform
- Over 487,000 demo sites launched (since the beginning of our contract to host demo.joomla.org)
- Over $160,000 paid to Open Source Matters in 2013 (and over $364,000 paid to OSM since receiving the contract to host demo.joomla.org)
- Over 7,500 YouTube Subscribers
- Over 2,000 page likes on Facebook
- Close to 1,000 Twitter Followers
- Over 100 Joomla 3.x tutorials & videos added to our Knowledgebase
- Over 50 Joomla Extension and Template Developer Webinars hosted, free of charge, for the community
What to expect in 2014
We've got a lot of work ahead of us in 2014. Of course, we hope to continue our relationship with Open Source Matters as the host of demo.joomla.org and we will continue to offer tutorials and webinars that benefit the entire community. We're also going to continue to improve the CCP to empower our clients to manage their online presence with ease.
We're planning to turn our Professional Services team inward in 2014. In the past, this team has created custom applications and Joomla Instances for clients on a case-by-case basis. In 2014, we'll be stopping Professional Services work altogether and those human resources will be spread out to our Platform team (improving our own web property) and our Insane Support Team (resulting in faster response times for support requests).
In 2014 we also plan to continue to develop our Partner and Affiliate Programs and add worldwide server locations in Europe, Asia and Australia. There are many other cool things we're working on that we're not quite ready to announce yet, so please stay tuned!